THE SINGULAR & EXTRAORDINARY TALE OF MIRROR & GOLIATH
from The Peculiar Adventures of John Loveheart, Esq., vol. I
Ishbelle Bee
Prologue
In the summer of 1887, my grandfather stole a clock. He trundled it out in a wheelbarrow and loaded it into a pony and trap, and off he went with a click-ity clop. A big smile stretched across his face like a chalk line drawn by a child on a blackboard, wonky and unsure.
Click-ity clop
The clock was six feet high
Click-ity clop
and the shape of a coffin.
Those wicked time machines. Pyramid, coffin, clock… click-ity-clop.
Smash up the clocks. Tread them underfoot, throw them at the walls. Break their faces, pull off their arms.
Stop clocks.
Stop the clocks.
S t o p t h e t i c k e t y - t o c k s .
Part One
I: August 1888
Liverpool
My guardian, the enormous, exotic and bearded Goliath Honey-Flower arrives like a star falling and imprinting the surface of the Earth.
* * *
THUD
he has landed.
A galactic footprint.
The moon a stage light for his materialization onto the Liverpool docks. The sky is the colour of porridge and the sea, a miserable treacle black. It makes everything sticky.
I am his ward and my name is Mirror. My name is a reflection. A piece of the moon.
My hair is red as paprika and I am bundled up in black bear furs. Goliath grips my hand and guides me onto the slimy surface of the dockyard.
Our captain, Mr Mackerel, is a white-bearded weathered old gent, with eyes like sea jewels. He deposits us on the docks with a wink and a crooked smile; like a demented midwife, delivers us straight from the sea. His strange, ragged cat gazes the shoreline for fat rats. I cuddled that cat like a teddy bear on the journey, feeding it bits of ham and stroking its orange fur as though it were a great tiger. It had eyes like magic beans, dark and chocolatey that looked at you and said, “I have my own secrets, you know. I am no ordinary cat.” Captain Mackerel calls him a little bugger and shakes his fists but, I am sure, loves him as deeply as he loves the sea.
I think that is all that matters in this world. It does not matter what you are as long as you love and are loved.
We have travelled from Egypt and it has taken us months to return to England. We had been staying in Cairo with Goliath’s father who is an archaeologist. He has been excavating a tomb of one of the Egyptian princesses.
The skies are gold and pink in Egypt and there are many gods. The skies in England are grey and pale blue and I am told there is only one god here but there used to be more. They have disappeared; swallowed up in stories. Left only words behind.
We visited the tomb of the Egyptian princess which was covered in drawings of blue beetles with horns and green fish with stars above their heads. Red flowers were painted on her skin and bursting like fire out of her mouth. The god in England is made of wine and bread, and his churches have pictures of grumpy looking men praying and angels with swords. I ask Goliath what the old gods of England were like, the ones who disappeared, and he tells me there were gods and goddesses, some of the river, of the forests and of the animals, and they would speak to humans in dreams and in the patterns of the stars.
I miss the colours of Egypt. I think about all those fire flowers of the princess and the little pots she was buried with. I got to hold them in my hands. They had tiny drawings of frogs on them and strange eye symbols. I wonder if she was some sort of enchantress, if she was something not from this world.